


safe as we can

by VesperRegina



Category: Galileo (TV Japan)
Genre: 30kisses, Alternate Universe, F/M, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-21 15:26:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6056659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VesperRegina/pseuds/VesperRegina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Perhaps it's too difficult for you to remember that, for a while, we were on good terms.  More than allies."</p>
            </blockquote>





	safe as we can

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ahria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ahria/gifts).



> Title from "Run" by Daughter. 30 Kisses prompt #9, 'dash'. Many thanks to _annefong_ for the concept.

The faint patter of rain and the dimness of the room create a false haven. The ceiling above their heads is not quite visible, but hangs there, foreboding. She shifts closer to her partner, hands under the covers gathering them up to cover her shoulder, as she turns to look at him.

"There's no room for you to disagree with me, is there, Professor? This has been a stupid mistake from start to finish."

"It's not done yet." The shadows of his eyes give nothing away.

"If you'd been hurt," she says, "this would have gone differently."

"That could still be in our future."

The sorrow in that catches her unaware and the breath she takes is just short a sob. Her face pinches, but she can't turn away in time to hide it. He touches the lines of the tense muscles, across her eyebrows, over her mouth.

* * *

"Now," she'd said, "we have to go now."

In this moment of stillness, hiding away here, she can't feel the spark of antagonism she's been trying to blow into a blaze. It's useless to think that she will. The footsteps are gone. They should leave, too, before they are found.

She almost says it, parts her lips, hears the click of it, and holds back. He can breathe with ease right now, but she's holding hers.

She closes her eyes, wincing, and releases that held breath. He won't notice it. The sound of laughter is muffled, but it seems to be closer than it is, and still he waits, and she lets him guard her.

She focuses, narrow and idiotic, on what is only before her: the black weave of his lapel, densely woven. Maybe it would be soft if she laid her forehead against it, stopped trying to hold herself in, stopped pretending that in this moment, they are both safe. She curls her fingers into her palms, feels the bite of her nails.

They are not safe. This is an illusion of safety, an intimacy she was trying to avoid, the tantalizing warmth and presence of his closeness, unavoidable.

"I have the worst timing," she mutters. He looks down at her, and there it is, access to the ire he's completely unaware of, brought to life by a question there that she's not about to answer.

She could just give in. Just slide her hands up to his neck, claw her fingers into his hair and pull him down, push her mouth into his, pull herself up into the curve of his body, stroke her tongue into the crevices of his lips, until she no longer felt stifled, but in control. 

Maybe he would push her away, if she did kiss him, his hands firm on her shoulders, warm until he took them away, leaving her cold, so much colder. Maybe they would be found, no matter how quiet they are. They would be found, and then this would be over. Maybe she could scream, and have his hand clapped over her mouth for just one second in which he would realize that she had played him, one second in which she could disarm him, and then choose, choose what end was best.

Leave him on his knees. Or leave him bleeding. 

An unfair fight in revenge for the position he's put her in. The end written for her, that she keeps forgetting to read.

"They're gone," she says, and the look he gives her is just shy of scornful.

She has so much to say and she won't remember any of it. Not when it counts.

She pushes past him, takes the risk that she's right.

He doesn't touch her when they leave, but his presence at her back gives the impression of ushering her out. If he were to touch her, to splay his hand between her shoulder blades, she wouldn't be able to stop the thought of more (the heat of his palm, the press of his fingers, the once desperation of the past).

The voices are louder, and the hallway is quiet soft carpet and the claustrophobic closeness of dark walls. She steps off to the side, away from him, and ignores the question in his eyes.

It might have been better to have stayed in that tiny room, pressed up against the wall. Stagnant, unchanging.

Better to have let someone else choose their fate.

* * *

Outside, the street glimmers harsh-edged light off wet black. One step into a puddle and her feet will be soaked, as will the hem of her dress. 

For a moment, before the crack of air splitting beside her cheek, before she smells acrid fabric -- cast back to her and blatant in the fresh cool humidity -- before that, she considers letting him go, like she did before, telling him to get out of her sight and take his information with him.

She's seen this before -- caused it before -- a rip along an arm bleeds down into the cuff of a sleeve, stains. A warning.

He's clutching his arm, but she's the one who understands what's been done, she's the one with all her choices narrowed to one, and she takes matters into her own hands, pushes him out of his frozen silence and pretends not to notice when he stumbles. "Run," she says, as she finds her fingers are tangling in his, pulling him, choosing for her, a path to ruin.

* * *

"Tell me you're not hurt," she demands, when he hesitates, while he catches breath. Hers doesn't come any easier and her side aches. What she wants to know is not in his eyes; what she expects to see is absent -- the selfishness of any other man, concerned only about himself. She almost despises him for it. If it were there, it would make it easier to turn her back on him.

"What about you?" he asks, instead.

"You're the one with a gash in your sleeve, now either show me or tell me, because I'm not waiting around for the moment you faint on me." 

"Check it yourself, if you're so concerned." His voice is cool, but under it is challenge, and her hands grow hot for a moment, burn to push him around for his impudence, and the subtle switch in his face from naked concern for her to concealment prickles like an annoying heat rash. 

"Fine. You're fine," she says, with flat disgust.

"Whatever gave it away, I wonder."

"You owe me for this dress." She looks away before she can give him the chance to divine more from the comment, the sub-layer of the unspoken debt of worry he'd caused her.

"The prices we pay, Ms. Utsumi," he tells her.

"We need to hide," she says.

* * *

They pass a food cart and he stops. "Aren't you hungry?" he asks. She's all set to answer no, before she smells the food.

He doesn't say a word when he orders food for her, but she can see the play of amusement at the corner of his mouth.

* * *

He did not ask her if this place was hidden from their eyes. The lack of concern he has for his safety is maddening. He sits and eats his food across from her, no hesitancy, and she loses the tenuous grasp she had on her own appetite, her mind engaged in incessant churning of a decision to be made.

He's finished his, wiped his fingers, arranged the remains in a neat collection of trash. She can see all that without allowing herself to look higher, see what he thinks of her, turning over her food, but not eating it.

"When's the last time you ate anything of substance?" So much for not knowing what he thinks.

She pushes the plate toward him. "I'm suddenly not hungry," she answers, and walks away, pacing to the one window of this tiny room. Her knee grazes the corner of the bed that takes up much of the space, knocking a corner of the piled blanket loose, dangling now, skimming the floor.

Looking out the heavy-curtained window reveals nothing more than it did before, from the hasty scrutiny to see if they were watched, so she turns again to him. She crosses her arms, and as an effort at disguising her body, it is a pitiful one. Her protection is a thin and brittle veneer. It wouldn't take much for him to crack it.

"You haven't been taking care of yourself for a long time."

"That's really none of your business."

"Like my secrets, I suppose."

She drops her arms out of their defensive posture, but the sneer that twists its way across her face works just as well to express her displeasure, done with concealing it.

"Here we are, hiding away, and you're welcome to leave, _Professor_ Yukawa, but what will that solve for you?"

He shrugs, looks away, down to his hands laced and almost out of view behind the trash on the table. 

"Perhaps it's too difficult for you to remember that, for a while, we were on good terms. More than allies."

For a moment, in which she is the witness, and she stands outside of herself and what used to be, she sees nothing but a weary man, and then it folds in on itself, that perception, gives up its ghost like she burned it up in her examination of it, whisked away when he looks up.

"They told you to kill me and that warning shot was for you. We weren't followed. This is your last chance to do it." His chin goes up as he says it, like surrender.

"I need to sleep," she says. "You should too. I'm using the bathroom." 

She makes a point to skirt around when she moves past him. He wouldn't reach out, but she senses the turn of his head, nevertheless, watching as she drags clothes out of the suitcase she throws on the bed. She won't be able to take refuge forever in avoiding the pity in his eyes.

* * *

Light falls, a slice across the darkness, cutting around her from behind. He covers his eyes with his hand for a moment in which she can do nothing but survey him, greedy, yet covert in her examination, all the vulnerability of him in her bed. He's claimed it in her absence.

"You regret this already," he says.

She crosses her arms over well-worn loose cotton. It's soft against her forearms, but she can still feel the ribbing of the weave in her palms, grasping at herself, everything heightened, isolated in her self-sufficiency. She's the shadow in the light, framed in it. He can't possibly see her face or the way she feels written across it.

He moves over in the bed, and turns his back to her, thin linen stretching across his back, over the lines of his undershirt. She has the advantage of being able to change, but he has the protection of being overdressed... or the need for it. 

She could question everything in this moment -- the claiming of the bed, yet the limitation of revelation in how he's chosen to stay dressed -- or she could take it at face value. The meaning is clear. Nothing but sharing of limited space. He stays that way as she sits on the edge, then gathers herself in, on her back. If she took a deep breath, she imagines, she'd close the gap between them.

"The reason we're here." She presses her lips together. She turns her head, lifting her chin, but unable to see him. "You want out too, don't you?"

She rubs her hand on her face, fingertips in her eyes, scraping away loss, and turns in the bed, facing his back. She reaches out, withdraws, her mouth bitten thin. A breath in, a breath out, then she says, "Look at me." It was supposed to be soft; instead, it's strained.

The plea goes unanswered. His choice. "This could be our chance," she whispers, and then she turns away again.

It doesn't matter if he hears her, when her breathing turns to stifled gasps; it doesn't matter that it is then he chooses to turn to her. It doesn't matter that she quakes with the sobs or that his breath warms the back of her neck. None of it is important, least of all the way he presses his mouth to the hollow beneath her ear.

* * *

When she wakes, she only blinks, feels her pulse quicken in a tiny leap after finding she's turned back to him. What a betrayal of her body. Her eyelids scrape her eyes; he is still close, and she is still sheltered, but he isn't touching her. Not anymore. His eyes are closed; that much she can make out. 

"I do remember," she says. He could be asleep; she doesn't wait to see if he'll respond. "You're everything I shouldn't trust." She flinches when he opens his eyes. 

He says, "I'm not whatever they've told you I am, but what you choose to believe isn't my concern."

She closes her eyes, pressure of her eyelids aching uncomfortable, and shakes her head. "Why didn't you just go when you had the ch--"

He rolls away, the sudden movement like an earthquake around them, shaking everything, and it's like a sign, this giving and taking away of security and faith. He knows nothing, and the distance of it keeps growing, in this reluctance and indecision.

She's fed herself too long on caution and obedience, and now it curdles quick inside her, impulse taking over with swiftness. She shifts her weight, pulls on his shoulder to force him on his back, swings herself over him, presses all her length against his, her hands on his face. She can't bring herself to care that her elbows dig into the bed and his body, not when she can feel the heat of his mouth beneath hers, the tip of the bone of his jaw sharp in her palm. For a moment everything is as she demands it to be, until he goes completely still and she stops and opens her eyes.

He looks up at her, eyes so dark, with her mouth still on his. 

"You shouldn't trust me, you say. But you do. Otherwise, you wouldn't keep throwing away your opportunities." 

The words flash through her in waves of heat and cold, a few seconds of panic in which all she wants is to get away, but can't, until actions plug into want and she scrambles away and folds in on herself on the floor, her hair fallen around her, knees all cutting angles under her mouth. His fingertips slide from her temple to behind her ear, and the touch connects her thought back to body, so that she can feel the shape of her apologies damp and warm on her knees.

"You've done nothing I need to forgive," he says. "Come up here."

He doesn't move away when she settles beside him.

When his hand slides from her shoulder, down her arm, facing each other, she puts her own hand on his and slides it lower.

"What do you want?" he asks. She tells him.

* * *

Her hair has tangles she combs through, with her fingers, after. He cleans himself, in her bathroom, with her an arm's length away, flushed between her breasts.

There, in front of the mirror, he strokes his hand on the damp skin of her back, and she turns to him, body still responsive, her eyes closing because of his touch, the slide of his hand from her hip, into the curve of her neck, fitting on her neck like a choker, thumb under her chin and her head tips back, mouth open, vulnerable. She still has tremors under her skin, faint, fading, but she bends under his fingers, relaxes, sighs. He kisses her, but with gentleness and not even fully on her mouth, his thumb pushing her chin up, and she arches herself into him, scratches his back with her fingernails.

"Thank you," she says. 

"This doesn't keep you blameless."

"No, it doesn't. I made the right choice the first time and I'm making it again."

* * *

She allows him to smooth the tension away from her face, allows herself the moment of just... resting, though there is too much to be done, too much to face.

"You know what they would do," she murmurs and her breath is caught by the palm of his hand, comes back in the space to warm her.

He can't keep the fear hidden now; it has been burning its way out of his body for a long time now, and she sees what has been visible in her own eyes and spirit for the time she's spent away from him. He rests his head against hers, forehead to forehead.

"We are safer together," he says.


End file.
